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Teacher-child relationship: a meeting of minds
... As regards the two basic processes in education, i.e. learning and teaching, it is evident that they are closely connected to the ability to share mental states: learning implies the ability to reason about the mental states of teachers (intentions, goals…) and teaching is based on assigning the specific mental states of ignorance or false belief to a pupil's mind (Liverta Sempio, 2004). Children must, on the one hand be aware that there is a difference between the knowledge of a teacher and a learnerand they mustbe awarethat a teacher performs a series of intentional actions aimed at increasing the children'sknowledge. ...
... Up to this point we discussed how children useTheory of Mind at school; the other question is how school can help development of Theory of Mind. This matter is not easy to study: it is a complex process (Lecciso, Liverta Sempio & Marchetti, 2004). It may be suggested that the affective relationship between ateacher and a pupil (e.g. ...
... attachment relationship; Pianta, 1999) and the way in which a teacher looks after the mental states of children (e.g. asking them what they think, know, believe, feel and using mental language during interaction with them) help children in the learning process and influences their mentalization ability (Liverta Sempio, 2004;Astington & Pelletier, 2005). ...
Reflective thinking can mean three different things. A first form of reflective thinking consists in elaborating personal conceptions about the mental activities and abilities and in becoming aware of what occurs in our and other people’s minds when we are engaged in intellectual tasks. This form of reflective thinking encompasses the research field usually labeled as “metacognition.” A second meaning of “reflective thought” regards Theory of Mind, which concerns more closely the realm of social interactions and relationships. Theory of Mind in fact is conceived as the recognition of one’s and others’ affective and epistemic mental states as the psychological causes and motives underlying behaviors. Metacognition and Theory of Mind are in part explicit and can be recognized by asking people to express verbally their beliefs about the mind; they are, however, also partially implicit, and they can be detected by observing how people behave – both in natural and in experimental settings – and speak. The third kind of reflective thinking takes the form of narration. In this case individuals reflect on their own and others’ mental lives by trying to make sense of what happens within and around them. People’s storytelling, on one hand, reveals their naïve psychological ideas and, on the other hand, hints at exploring and understanding their own and other persons’ mental states and intentions better. The forms of reflective thinking mentioned are seen as important competences that are needed to equip an individual to face the demands of reality. Their functional meaning appears in informal settings – such as spontaneous conversations and dialogues – as well as in formal contexts, such as instructional environments. Furthermore, they are shaped by interpersonal relationships and by literacy because an individual is an active partner in social exchanges, belongs to a given culture, and uses specific artifacts in which values, norms, and rules are embedded.
To perceive and interpret human behavior in terms of intentional mental states, such as feeling, beliefs, purposes, needs, desires, and reason, is what we call “mentalizing.” Boggi Cavallo’s assumption could lead to the hypothesis that beliefs, created and maintained by the individual along the life span, can affect the core of self-perception and also play a part in determining behaviors and social interactions. From this crucial point of view, the effort to deepen understanding of the construction of representations, knowledge and beliefs, and the environment in which they develop could proceed hand-in-hand with the ongoing commitment to promote mentalizing abilities in communities.KeywordsMentalizationDevelopmental psychologyCommunity psychology
This chapter is a combined effort, and it is distinct in two ways. On the one hand, it proposes the most recent theoretical perspectives on Theory of Mind development within a contextual view. On the other hand, the following pages discuss the work of those people who, over the last fifteen years, have collaborated with Olga Liverta Sempio, to whom this book is dedicated. Without her valuable, thoughtful work and her continuous intellectual input, the Theory of Mind Research Unit (directed by Olga Liverta Sempio and Antonella Marchetti) would not have been set up within the Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Each section of the chapter is by those researchers who contributed significantly to investigation of the topic, for the most part with Olga Liverta Sempio and Antonella Marchetti. Flavia Lecciso The parent-child relationship is the first socially affective experience, and it may be considered a template of what children can expect from others and how they can meet other people’s expectations. In terms of this perspective, the primary relationship may be studied not only as the environment in which a child can or cannot learn about mental states, but also as the context that determines the degree to which the social environment can be analyzed and processed.
This study investigated two different expressions of the so-called curse of knowledge in primary school children: hindsight bias and outcome bias. Further, it explored the possible predictive function of false belief understanding in reducing these biases. Ninety-one children aged 7, 9, and 11 years (middle- to upper-middle class) were administered classical first- and second-order false belief tasks as well as hindsight and outcome bias tasks in a within-subjects design, while controlling for cognitive level. Both biases were found at all ages. Second-order false belief understanding seemed to reduce outcome bias but not hindsight bias. These findings indicate that the curse of knowledge is a multifaceted construct with potential relevant implications for learning in children.
The study assessed Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in a group of oral deaf children and in their hearing mothers using a battery of ToM tasks. It also investigated the connection between mother and child in ToM performance. Participants were: 17 oral deaf children (aged 5 to 14 years) were paired by gender, age, and mental age with 17 hearing children; 17 hearing mothers of deaf children and 17 hearing mothers of hearing children. Compared to the hearing children, the deaf children faced difficulties in all ToM tests, and the hearing mothers of the deaf children were less capable than the mothers of the hearing children in all the ToM tests. Further, a specific ToM interaction model was found between the hearing mothers and the deaf children. The results confirmed ToM poor performance faced by the oral deaf children, showed the ToM level of hearing mothers of deaf children, and the ToM style of hearing mothers–deaf children dyads. Also, findings underline some educational implications related to the socio-relational origin of the ToM deficit in oral deaf children.
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